Opinion: The NFL is moving to L.A., and it won’t be cheap

JasonNotte

The NFL is going to put a team in Los Angeles, but it just wants to do so in as dramatic a fashion as possible.

This week, team owners met in Chicago to hear the St. Louis Rams’, San Diego Chargers’ and Oakland Raiders’ proposals for new stadiums in Los Angeles. It was a closed-door session, but we give credit to Sam Farmer at the Los Angeles Times for basically putting an ear to the door and figuring out what was going on. With insight from New York Giants owner Steve Tisch, Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, Farmer gleaned that although the Rams’ presentation was twice as long, the Chargers’ and Raiders’ pitches for a stadium in Carson, Calif., headed by former San Francisco 49ers President Carmen Policy hit a whole lot of right notes.

While noting that both the Chargers’ Qualcomm Stadium and the Raiders’ O.co Coliseum dated back to the 1960s and were older than San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, which has since been razed, Policy based his pitch around the fact that each of these teams had once played in Los Angeles (the Chargers for a season in 1960, the Raiders from 1982 to 1994) and that moving them to Carson would keep them both in familiar California territory.

“[Y]ou’re not only curing the California dilemma, but you’re curing it with California teams,” Policy said. “These teams were born and bred in California. They’ve always been in California. They never left California.”

As if to confirm the suspicion of Farmer and others that the league has a soft spot for Chargers owner Dean Spanos and desperately wants his team in Los Angeles, the Chargers followed up the league’s ensuing discussion of relocation fees and potential season ticket sales for the yet-nonexistent Los Angeles franchise by basically spitting on San Diego’s latest stadium offer later that day. San Diego’s offer: $350 million toward the cost of a $1 billion stadium. This is the part where we remind folks that in the history of publicly funded NFL stadiums, only five other stadiums have ever taken more than $350 million in initial public funding.

The first, Cincinnati’s Paul Brown Stadium, was a lopsided nightmare that cost surrounding Hamilton County $425 million at the outset. The Bengals put only $25 million into the stadium that opened in 2000, while the county had to slash programs and close hospitals just to pay the ever-increasing debt.

Chicago and Cook County followed that up with the $387 million decision to desecrate Soldier Field by landing the spaceship from “Flight of the Navigator” inside it to create extra seating — a move that cost the building its landmark status, but only cost the Bears $200 million. Indianapolis and Indiana set the gold standard back in 2008 by not only contributing $619 million to the cost of Lucas Oil Stadium — which was more than the total cost of any stadium built to that point — but stacking that on top of debt it still owed on the since-razed RCA Dome. The Colts parted with just $100 million. And while Minneapolis and Minnesota are shoving nearly $500 million toward Zygi Wilf and the Vikings stadium that his own Los Angeles-based strong-arming built, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was at least kind enough to book enough events in Dallas’ AT&T Stadium to put it on track to pay off its $444 million public debt early.

Yet the San Diego Union-Tribune, which can’t wave its pom-poms wildly enough for a new stadium, calls San Diego’s proposed $350 million contribution “a mere 33%.” Jerry Jones built his stadium on a “mere” 37% contribution, the Philadelphia Eagles skated by on “mere” 36% public funding. Robert Kraft gave the New England Patriots a new home with a “mere” 17% contribution for infrastructure improvements. Oh, and New Jersey — still carrying debt from Giants Stadium — wound up paying a “mere” 0% in public funding for the Jets’ and Giants’ new MetLife Stadium. We’re sure that whenever the Tribune wants to get back to its job of afflicting the comforted and comforting the afflicted, it can go into what that “mere” $350 million and proposed land sales and tax breaks might mean to the city if redirected toward other concerns (infrastructure, education, the Convention Center that it receives all revenue from, etc.)

In the meantime, a “mere” $400 million and the Chargers’ and Raiders’ home-field advantage might be all it takes to get Rams owner Stan Kroenke to stay in St. Louis if the NFL likes the pitch St. Louis makes at another meeting in October. However, given that Kroenke might be the odd man out and have no other viable options (even the Raiders have so far passed on San Antonio), maybe St. Louis has some room to negotiate.

However, we doubt San Diego will be so kind during that same meeting, when it can tell the Chargers to spend a “mere” $850 million of their own money on a $1.7 billion facility in Carson. The NFL’s return to L.A. is going to be costly, but that doesn’t mean taxpayers should have to foot the bill for any of it.

Jason Notte is a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Esquire. Notte received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in 1998. Follow him on Twitter @Notteham.

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